Why the medium and the message matter equally

On the chicken-or-egg-coming-first question, a case can be made for either answer. Personally - assuming we are talking about a hen's egg - I am inclined to go for the egg coming first, and I like to think that Richard Dawkins would back me up, on the basis that the world's first chicken had to emerge from some sort of egg, whereas the first true hen's egg could have been created by the mating of two slightly different birds. That said, the chicken is no less important by dint of coming second. In fact, you could argue that the chicken actually gets top billing. I would rather take the chicken with me to a desert island than the egg on two counts; egg production and much-needed companionship. Never confuse your position in a sequence of events with your status, value or sex appeal.

When it comes to advertising, should the medium or the message be decided first? The only fervent McLuhanites are we media planners, believing fervently that the medium can be the message. There are few ad people who wouldn't at least accept that the context in which a message is delivered can change consumers' perception of it. The same easyJet print ad seen in this paper compared to a red-top would undoubtedly confer some rather different values on to the brand. Having seen my fair share of DFS TV ads, seeing the same piece of creative in the cinema made me think of them as a slightly more glamorous retailer.

Those examples are easy though, because the different choices of medium don't require a different creative expression. It's not so simple when the media planner comes along and presents a convincing case for using only radio and online, when the creative agency has already developed advertising concepts for TV and posters. At least in that instance the creative work would still be the responsibility of the same agency. Imagine how popular the media planner would be with a communications strategy that made the case for delivering the client's objectives using only PR, event sponsorship and direct mail, none requiring the creative agency's work.

This issue comes up all the time amongst the roster of advertising (in its broadest sense) specialists, be they creative, direct marketing, media planning, media buying, PR, or sales promotion agencies, that most advertisers appoint to help them with the task of communicating with consumers. The origins of ad agencies lie in media; agents represented media owners and their income was from commission paid by media owners. Eventually they offered a supplementary service by writing and drawing too and the 20th century advertising agency was born, one representing clients' interests not media owners'. This worked OK-ish for the greater part of that century, when media choices and formats were simpler.

But the industry is now fractured into a galaxy of different disciplines and specialisms and brand marketing teams have a headache managing this. They can tackle it in a variety of ways. Sometimes the client personally controls the process with each agency given an equal shout and equal access. Sometimes a marketing services holding company or consortium is given the overall task with a centralised account and strategy team not specific to any individual discipline. Any infighting then takes place away from the clients' eyes. Last year, HSBC appointed the WPP Group on a global basis to look after every aspect of marketing communications and it will be fascinating to see whether HSBC's final marketing mix looks very different from where it started. If it does, I hope this is because the right decisions have become easier, rather than having anything to do with WPP's income.

But the way most brands manage their roster is to appoint a "lead" agency and nine times out of ten this is the creative agency. The rest of the agency team is then exhorted to be "collaborative", despite the suspicion that the "lead" agency has an incentive to cross-sell other agencies owned by its holding company. No one solution is better than another and frankly it's all dependent on the quality and integrity of the human beings involved. My only gripe is that the creative agency process, which moves from market and consumer research, through brand strategy, to advertising strategy, to creative solution, needs to pause early on until the communications strategy is agreed, which might then mean an advertising route is not appropriate at all. It doesn't make the media egg more important than the creative chicken. On the contrary, a brilliant ad will always deliver more value and more emotional involvement than a brilliant media plan. But clients should demand both.